


you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes

by smc_27



Category: The Society (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 11:14:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20388784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smc_27/pseuds/smc_27
Summary: “Why’d you come?” he asks, and his tone is...He sets his hand down next to hers, then uses his pinky to touch her blue polished nail. It’s chipping. He’s noticed. He hooks his pinky around hers, then, and tugs a little before letting go. Then he takes his drink back and finishes the rest.





	you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes

They’d been hesitant to allow this. The guard, and Gordie, and god, yeah, Will. No one more hesitant than her, though. 

Movie nights are one thing. A party with alcohol and some convoluted competition is entirely another. 

She decides not to take part in the scavenger hunt. For one thing, it’d be really fucking bad look if she won, and she’s too competitive not to try. For another, she thinks there should be something that’s just for everyone else. And look, yeah, she’d love to just have a night to be a regular freaking teenager and not have to think about who’s sober and who’s keeping an eye on Campbell, and what the plan is if anyone gets hurt. It’s annoying as shit that they have to plan that all out, now. They literally had a meeting to discuss how to pull this off with minimal disruption of the fun, but maximum safety and security. 

They don’t need another fucking prom. The guard wanted her to stay home. Grizz offered to personally sit in her bedroom with her. 

She sees, when she arrives, Helena with a glass of what looks like white wine in her hand, her other absently toying with her cross necklace. She’s talking with Elle, who’s got her hands in her pockets and doesn’t look to be drinking. Allie’s eyes scan for Campbell, and as expected, he’s not far away, watching Elle, and not in a cute way. Ugh. Grizz hums next to her like he’s noticing the same thing, and she honestly thinks, sometimes, that he’s the best of all of them. 

Harry jumps up onto the back of the pickup truck parked in his driveway, and yeah, she can tell right away that he’s had a couple, and that whatever’s in that rocks glass is probably some expensive shit he socked away for himself that no one else can have. 

She wonders if he’d share if she asked. She’s not going to. She’s just curious. 

He catches her eye, and she realizes only now that the last time she was here, they slept together - she _slept with him_ \- and it was all stupid highschool junk where she thought it was somehow important that she lost her virginity to the hottest guy in school, or whatever. It feels like forever ago that any of that was of any importance at all. 

He goes over the rules, tells everyone all the clues are written on pale blue cards and they’re peppered throughout the town, but is sure to say that no one is to break into any buildings or houses, and that if they do there’ll be punishment by way of further rationing and more shifts on the work schedule. What? She needed some way of making sure shit didn’t devolve into absolute mayhem. He says that people can work in teams or on their own, and that if anyone gets hurt, they’re to go to one of four safe zones immediately and they’ll get help. He also says that anyone who isn’t playing can stay here or wander around, but isn’t allowed to help anyone who’s playing; if they see clues or figure anything out, they’ve gotta keep it to themselves. 

If Allie’s being really honest about this, she’s impressed. Not only has he followed all the guidelines he was asked to, but he’s kept this fun and everyone is excited. She buries her face in her scarf and watches only him as he counts down and shouts, “Go!” and blows the air horn. 

She laughs a bit as most people take off running. They’re going in all different directions, shouting and just acting their ages. Grizz puts his arm around her shoulders, and at first she thinks it’s just him being protective, but then he chuckles a bit and she looks at him and realizes that he, too, is just sort of taking it in. This is the kind of stupid kid shit they should be able to do, and he also seems to realize it. 

There are about 30 people who aback at the house. Most of them are drinking. Someone’s put some music on in one of the cars and opened all the doors. There was an effort a while ago to find CDs and records and people who’s actually had things saved to computers instead of just using Spotify. 

“I wonder if Old Town Road is still number one,” Grizz says absently, and Allie can’t help it, she laughs her ass off. So hard that it makes him laugh, too. It’s such a freaking ridiculous thought, but it’s also a thing they do sort of regularly, she and him. They think about the real world and what might be happening. What movies are out. He’s pissed he missed Spiderman. She’s bummed she can’t watch the next installment of To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. And that she’ll never know how The Handmaid’s Tale ends. 

After a bit, she hops up onto the back of the truck to sit down. It’s a good vantage point down the driveway, and since Harry’s house is literally on a hill (because of course it is) she can see pretty far, where the streetlights are casting light, anyway. 

She hadn’t realized Harry even went into the house - last she clocked him, he was talking to Luke on the lawn - but he wanders out with his glass refilled. His smile is crooked when he sees her, and he comes over, pushes himself up so he can sit next to her. Before saying anything, he holds his glass out to her in offering. She smiles a bit to herself, thinking of her earlier question, but shakes her head. He rolls his eyes and takes a sip. 

They’re quiet a few moments, and then she elbows him sorta hard and he furrows his brow and looks at her like she’s crazy. 

“What the hell’s that for?”

“Nothing,” she says, which feels like the truth. He cocks his brow. “You’re good at this.”

“At...sitting on…”

“Shut up.” He laughs, looks down and swirls his drink in his glass. “Planning things and making sure people actually have fun.”

He shrugs a shoulder instead of saying anything. Allie grips the edge of the tailgate and turns to look at him. “People’re starting to feel like our parents. Fucking bored and stuck in dead end jobs.”

Her chest is tight. She knows that’s how it feels. How it is. For as much as she wishes she did, she doesn’t have a solution for it. They can’t just not operate like they have been. It works because people are on board.

If she dwells on this, or asks him any followup questions (like who’s said that, and if it’s an epidemic, and what the hell she’s supposed to do about it) she’s going to end up bothered at best and crying at worst. 

“You could start a social committee,” she offers, and he scoffs and shakes his head. She turns to him a bit more, sets her hand on his knee. He looks at it there. “I’m serious. People would be totally into it if you lead it.”

“Yeah, nothing says a good time like mandatory fun days planned to excess by a _committee_.” He takes a drink. “You can’t have a committee for everything. That’s the entire problem with this place.” Allie snorts, embarrassingly, then looks to see if he noticed, and he’s got this little smile on his face. Shit. “That and the fact that no one can figure out how the fuck we leave.”

“Small details, then.” He shrugs again. She reaches for his glass, and their eyes lock as she takes a sip. Just like she thought, it’s some fancy scotch that tastes like licking a rock. And because she thinks it’s important, she adds, “I’m doing the best I can.”

It’s something - or a version of something - she says a lot. People doubt her literally almost daily. She somehow feels like everyone’s forgotten that she’s never done this before, and didn’t want to in the first place. The burden that places on her shoulders feels like a goddamn immovable object. All her wins are small wins. Progress is slow, but plodding along. The fact that people are bored, she thinks, means that the system is working. And that makes her feel like everything’s entirely too fucked up. God, if they could just forget a while…

“Why’d you come?” he asks, and his tone is...He sets his hand down next to hers, then uses his pinky to touch her blue polished nail. It’s chipping. He’s noticed. He hooks his pinky around hers, then, and tugs a little before letting go. Then he takes his drink back and finishes the rest. 

“I was invited.”

“That’s not a reason, or motivation, or whatever. Why’d you…”

“I didn’t want people to think I didn’t support it.” She pauses. “I didn’t want you to think that, either.”  
He’s thinking of something, she can tell. The air just got heavier around them. Gordie laughs at something nearby, but Allie doesn’t even look over to see who he’s talking to. Harry’s sort of slouched a bit, back rounded, head bowed. 

“The last you even spoke directly to me you were...” 

He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to. They both remember very well when he was making an apology and she cut him off and made him leave. She wasn’t ready to hear and it she didn’t think it mattered. At the time, she was sitting in her own grief and not willing to do anything to stop it from swallowing her whole, if that was what it was going to do. Honestly, she didn’t give a shit. Sure, she cared about the town and the people in it, but if she’d died, too, she wouldn’t have even given a passing thought to how shit would go down without someone with the last name Pressman to keep everything from going pear shaped. She’d been pissed off, and sad, and exhausted, and just...Of all the people in her life she had it in her to give energy to, the guy who’d said awful things about her sister wasn’t one of them. And if she’s being honest with herself, it hurt her even more because she’s never hated Harry as much as anyone (as much as Cassandra) thought she did or should. No, the crush had always been there, since the time when they were just barely even teenagers and he’d told her she looked pretty at midnight mass during the holidays when no one else was around. 

Having a connection with him - _sleeping with him_ \- and then learning he’d been so fucking ice cold made her feel like some part of this was her fault. She knows it’s not true. But that still lingers somewhere in the back of her mind. Like some Romeo and Juliet shit, or whatever. Some feud she should’ve respected.

“I forgive you,” she practically blurts out, and he freezes - she watches him - next to her. He turns his head slowly, meets her eyes as if he’s dying to know whether or not she’s serious. 

“What?”

She presses her lips together hard, and then takes a deep breath. She doesn’t think she should have to explain herself, so she says the same thing again. “I forgive you.”

He shakes his head. Either he doesn’t believe her, or doesn’t understand how she could be telling the truth. 

“You...I’m an asshole. I...Why?”

She grins a little, mostly to keep the tears that’re stinging her eyes from doing anything stupid like falling down her cheeks. 

“Why not?”

“Allie.” The way he breathes out her name reminds her of when he’d been on top of her and his lips next to her ear. God. Now’s really not the time to be thinking about that. “How, then?”

“I guess I’m just a better person than you are.” She shoves his shoulder with hers, and he closes his eyes, lets out a bitter laugh. “I’m kidding.”

“No,” he says, almost before she’s even done speaking. “You’re not.”

Feeling daring, she reaches over and sets her hand on his back right between his shoulder blades. No one’s really paying attention to them. She’s a bit surprised by that, but also doesn’t care. They’re doing nothing more than having a conversation. No one needs to know the details. 

She feels the deep breaths he takes - three in a row, like some kind of coping mechanism. It’s what her mom always used to tell her to do, when she’d be mad at Cassandra for taking all the attention. Even now, she’s got to wonder why _she_ was always the one who had to do something about it, and why Cassandra was never asked to change anything about herself. It’s not the time to think of that. It’s never the time to think of that. 

He sits up a little straighter, so she moves her hand, and he’s just looking at her, watching her. He glances at her lips, then smiles to himself and bows his head again. She thinks she sees the slightest blush on the apples of his cheeks before he shakes his head. She’s not stupid. He’s probably thinking of kissing her. Or at least of the times when he did. 

“I like you,” he confesses, and it sounds just like that. like something he’s known for a while but has been scared to say. She honestly doesn’t even know who he’d tell, other than her. She has to wonder how long he’s been feeling it. “Sometimes I think if I wasn’t such a coward, shit would be different.”

She laughs, though it’s not funny and he’s being super vulnerable. She hopes he’s not offended. If he is, he doesn’t let on. 

“Oh yeah? Different how?”

He says, “Honestly, one night with you doesn’t seem like enough,” and she feels her whole heart in her chest, and something else entirely in other parts of her body. 

“God, Harry,” she breathes, and there’s that half grin - the one that makes people want to sleep with him in the first place. “Don’t.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

He laughs a little. She knows she’s giving mixed messages. “You don’t deserve to be here. You don’t deserve any of this shit.” 

Scoffing, she looks across the lawn at everyone else. More people have come back who’ve given up on the game. She looks into the empty crystal glass that’s still sitting between them, and wishes there was something in it she could drink. 

“And you do?”

Harry leans back on his hands, tips his head back and looks skyward. She glances up, too, sees all the stars above her. She’d normally thing it was nice. These days, she just thinks about stars and their position and what that can tell her about where the fuck they are and how they get home, if home even exists anymore. If this isn’t it. 

“I don’t know,” he says, voice strained by how his head’s back. 

She thinks if things were different, easier, she’d climb into his lap right here and take his face in her hands. 

“What do you want?” she asks, and it feels like the heaviest fucking question she could’ve put out there. 

He looks at her again, eyes dark, then sits up and reaches for the beltloop of her jeans, hooks his finger through it and tugs. She doesn’t move. She’s not going to. God, he just told her what he wants, didn’t he? He’s made it super clear. And you know what? If someone else was in charge of this place, she thinks she’d love nothing more than to pass the time by getting caught up with him in something that makes no sense but feels good anyway. 

“I wanna get high and act 18.” Allie laughs out loud and he’s just looking at her. “And take you upstairs.” She clicks her tongue, tilts her head and almost pleads with him to stop. The more he talks, the more she wants it, too. “But upstairs in a house I have to myself, without all these fucking lame roommates.”

She lets out a quiet laugh, then turns herself towards him a bit. Her knee brushes his, and she absolutely shouldn’t ask, “Then what?” but she does, and watches him swallow. 

He pauses, thinks about it, then shakes his head again. They’re pushing it too far. She didn’t think he’d be the one to stop it. She really thought he’d play along until she told him not to. 

“We all want shit we can’t have, right?” His eyes are locked on hers and she nods slowly. “What do you want?”

Allie leans back, lays down in the bed of the truck and feels him looking down at her. She closes her eyes. 

“Who fucking knows?”

He pats her thigh, says, “I do,” and then nothing else, and she balls her right hand into a fist, because she thinks it’s true, and he’s right, and this purgatory they’re in, or whatever the hell’s going on, will always have them _here_, too. They’ll always dance around being something. Being anything. And all the other stuff will get in the way. 

And she thinks that even as she considers that it was like this at home, too. There was Cassandra, and money, and status, and all that stuff standing between them. But there were also looks in the hallway, and that time he bought her coffee when she didn’t have her wallet, and when he laughed at her joke when she was sitting in front of him during an assembly. She remembers looking over her shoulder and seeing the hot as hell look on his face as he locked eyes with her. 

They don’t say anything for a bit, and then he uses his index finger to push her hair off her forehead, then grabs his glass and gets up. 

She stays there, just like that, until she hears his voice talking to someone else, and she realizes he’s not coming back. 

She leaves with Grizz before the winner is announced. They listen to Jeff Buckley in her bedroom and she’s too inside her own head to hold much of a conversation. When he asks if she’s okay, she says she’s as good as she always is, and knows it’s not a lie. 

… … …

When they’re grabbing her handcuffs behind her back, pulling her back towards the car, she turns her head and finds Harry’s eyes. He looks scared, and she almost calls him a coward, but knows he’s very well aware that he is one. He just is. 

She won’t look away from him. He needs to know, too, that he did this. _He_ did this. 

Maybe the only thing that’s real between them is the fact that he could do something about it and doesn’t. Maybe that’s all there is.


End file.
